1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to a method and apparatus for providing status information for print job requests while simultaneously providing document archival, document services, and community services related to the print request.
2. Description of Related Art
Generally, systems that support communities of practice in work organizations tend to be decoupled from daily work practices. By coupling such systems directly with daily work practices users are able to benefit from such systems without additional efforts. Benefiting from systems that support communities of practice means that knowledge that is relevant within a community of users is efficiently captured and shared between the users of the community.
One such system known as the “SmartPrinter” developed by Xerox Corporation captures data within a print stream. The SmartPrinter system captures and archives the contents of about-to-be printed documents, as well as, information about the document (e.g., title), and sends it to a print memory to preserve it for future use (e.g., archive) and sharing (e.g., community knowledge).
After a document is recorded in print memory, the SmartPrinter system may be used to apply one or more document services to the stored document. Such document services include document conversion, translation, linguistic-based content analysis, document identification and comparison, keyword indexing, categorization and clustering, and data mining.
With the ability to automatically perform document services on a print stream, the SmartPrinter system can be integrated with other software to further automate knowledge flow by, for example, providing automatic distribution, enterprise storage, search and retrieval, translation, and summarization. As a community tool, the SmartPrinter system enhances awareness of community interest and activities by allowing community users to identify documents of related interest.
In operation, the SmartPrinter system generates a coversheet for every printed document. The coversheet acts as a container of information about the document and identified related documents. Embedded in the coversheet is an encoded identifier of the document (that is also recorded in memory of the SmartPrinter system) and checkboxes or entry boxes to allow a user to specify instructions, enter handwritten notes, assign categories and keywords, draw connections among documents, send identified files to an archive or distribute them to community members. Once the coversheet is completed, it is scanned and decoded to carry out the specified instructions.
The SmartPrinter system is more fully described in the following publications, which are all incorporated herein by reference: U.S. patent application Publications US 2002/0080387 A1 and US 2002/0116291 A1; “Welcome to SmartPrinter” available on the Internet April 2003 at http://www.xrce.xerox.com; Grasso et al., “Who Can Claim Complete Abstinence from Peeking at Print Jobs?”, in Proceedings of CSCW 2002, New Orleans, USA, Nov. 16, 2002; Grasso, “Mining community knowledge from the print stream”, in Workshop on Community Knowledge, ECSCW 2001, Bonn, Germany, 16–20 Sep., 2001; Grasso et al., “Augmenting Recommender Systems by Embedding Interfaces into Office Practices”, in Proceedings of HICSS-33, 4–7 Jan., 2000.
Similar to the SmartPrinter system developed by Xerox Corporation, Ricoh Corporation has developed a system called the eCabinet™ for automatically archiving and managing files from networked peripherals such as printers, scanners, and fax machines. The eCabinet™ is more fully described in the following publications: Meyer, “eCabinet and File Processing: File Evolution from Capture to Retrieval”, Ricoh Silicon Valley, available on the Internet at http://www.ecabinet.net/pdf/file_evol_wp.pdf, April, 2001; and Hull et al., “Towards zero-effort personal document management: a new paradigm for users”, in IEEE's Computer Magazine, Vol. 34, No. 3, pp. 30–35, March 2001.
Notwithstanding these existing systems, email users continue to make use of email as an archival tool. However, using email as an archival tool does not facilitate the sharing of such archived email or their attached documents with a community of users. It would therefore be desirable to provide a system that allows the practice of using email as a tool to archive email or documents attached to the email while simultaneously providing document services and community services, as well as, dynamic (i.e., up-to-date) information related thereto. Advantageously, such a system would allow electronic mail (i.e., email message and document attachments) to be more easily shared between community members, at the same time it is archived. In this way, electronic mail and service requests can be integrally linked as an integrated archival and knowledge sharing tool that allows users to archive and save information without having to consciously do so (i.e., while using customary work practices).